Board packs tend to grow. Someone asks a question, a slide is added to answer it, and it stays permanently. Two years later there are forty pages, most of which nobody reads, and finance spends three days a month assembling them.
Here is a view on what earns its place.
1. Cash and runway. Closing cash, net burn, months of runway on the current plan, and the date at which you need to have raised. Everything else is context; this is the number that determines the company's options.
2. Revenue and the ARR bridge. Opening ARR, new, expansion, contraction, churn, closing ARR — alongside recognised revenue and the reconciliation between them. If your board sees ARR without the bridge to statutory revenue, they will eventually ask why the two disagree, usually at the worst moment. We covered this in why ARR and recognised revenue never tie.
3. Actual versus plan, with commentary. Not just the variance — the explanation, and what you are doing about it. A variance without commentary invites the board to construct their own explanation.
4. Unit economics. Gross margin, CAC payback, net revenue retention. These are the metrics that determine valuation and the ones an investor will interrogate. They need to be calculated consistently, from defined inputs.
5. The thing you are worried about. Every good board pack names the current risk explicitly. Boards discover problems eventually; a CFO who surfaces them first is trusted, and one who does not is not.
A full trial balance. Nobody reads it — make it an appendix.
Every departmental cost line at the top level. Roll up to a level a director can hold in their head; keep the detail available.
Metrics nobody has acted on for six months. If a chart has never changed a decision, it is decoration.
Charts without a takeaway. If a slide has no sentence explaining what it means, either write one or remove it.
Two items that belong in an ANZ board pack and are often missing.
FX exposure. If you earn USD and spend AUD, the board should see the exposure and the rate assumptions behind the forecast. A material adverse move should not be a surprise reported after the fact.
Statutory and tax calendar. BAS positions, PAYG instalments, income tax, R&D tax incentive timing. The R&D incentive in particular is a meaningful cash item for many Australian software companies, and its timing affects runway.
The largest cost of a board pack is usually not the analysis — it is the assembly. Exporting from the ledger, pasting into a spreadsheet, formatting, then rebuilding it in slides. Every month. With the errors that manual rekeying introduces.
The alternative is to define the reports once in the system, against agreed metric definitions, and generate them. The analysis and commentary is where a CFO adds value; the assembly is not.
This requires the underlying reporting layer to hold the definitions — which in turn requires the dimensional structure to support them, which is why chart of accounts design matters more than it appears.
Whatever you include, keep it stable. A board pack whose format changes every month prevents directors from building a mental model of the business, and it makes trends impossible to read.
Add sparingly, remove deliberately, and keep the core five in the same place every time.
We build board reporting into implementations rather than leaving it as a post-go-live project — agreeing the metric definitions, configuring the reports, and making sure they reconcile to the statutory numbers.
Talk to us, or read on chart of accounts design for the structural layer underneath.